Tranquility (10 page)

“The eye doctor will know that you can see.”

“How would he know?”

“Because you'll be blinking when he flashes the light into your eyes.”

“I bet you I won't. Come on, try to make me blink, come on.”

“How much do you wanna bet?”

“If I won't blink, for a whole week you'll be the younger one.”

“Not that; we've already decided that.”

“All right; how about pinching some blood cartridges from Mother's dressing room? The permanganate stings my nose.”

“All right. And what if I win?”

“I'll do your homework in Hungarian all next week.”

“Including the grammar stuff,” she said.

“All right,” I said.

And the next day Judit stole a whole box of blood cartridges from the theater because I looked through her exactly the way real blind people would. I didn't even bat my eyelids when she waved her score sheets at me.

“You win,” she said, and she helped me with my pajamas, but only two days later did my mother notice that I was blind.

“We should go see the doctor. It's terrible that your nose is bleeding so much. You have a lot of absences in school as it is,” she said.

“I'll make that all up,” I said, and wanted to hit the soft-boiled egg with a teaspoon, but missed.

“What's with you?” she asked.

“Nothing, I'll do it in a second,” I said, and missed again, while gazing right through the blue of her eyes into nothingness.

Irritated, she took the egg, broke the shell and put it back in front of me, but my hand wouldn't find the saltcellar. Cautiously, I kept feeling around the table, not to upset the teacup, reached into the butter dish while my mother was getting more and more nervous, but still it didn't occur to her that I may have become blind.

“Here, wipe your hand,” Judit said, and brought a dishcloth, and I reached in the wrong direction, waiting for her to put the cloth in my hand.

“What is going on here?” my mother asked.

“He hasn't been able to see for three days,” Judit said.

“What do you mean he can't see? Why can't he?”

“Because he's gone blind. When Effenbach is here, he stares into the lamp for hours,” Judit said.

“My God!” my mother cried, ran over and knelt before me, held my head between her palms, but I was still looking through the blue of her eyes into nothingness.

“His nose is bleeding because of the potassium permanganate,” Judit said. “Because he doesn't dare go to school while he is blind.”

“Oh, Jesus, get dressed immediately,” my mother said.

“He can't. I've been dressing him for the last three days,” Judit said.

“Why didn't either of you tell me? What did you think would happen if you said nothing to me?” she said, and that would have been the only opportunity to see her really cry, but I was blind. I let her dress me; I let her pull off my pajamas and put on the first items of clothing that came to hand, and then put my winter shoes on my bare feet.

“We didn't want to bother you before the premiere,” Judit said coldly and continued eating her toast. “By the way, he's got no socks on,” she said, enjoying my mother's desperation.

“Bring them to me then!” my mother screamed.

“They're all dirty,” Judit lied.

“Then bring me some dirty ones,” she said quietly, then ordered a taxi, to which she carried me in her arms.

“To the Pál Heim clinic,” she said to the cabbie, as if speaking in another person's voice. And at Üllői Road I already knew I wouldn't be able to look into the doctor's lamp without blinking. I could no longer gaze through the blue of my mother's eyes either. The next time she took my face between her hands, her blinding irises trapped my eyes and my cheeks were wet
with tears; it would have been so good to hold out at least until we got to the hospital, but I could already see. At first, I saw only that her face had relaxed, and then that it hardened into a statue.

“Turn around,” she called to the driver in the same voice she'd use ten years later when she was having a prop coffin taken to the Kerepesi. We made our way home in complete silence; at home, she only said, Don't you ever dare blackmail me again, and then left without saying goodbye.

.   .   .

The three railroad workers were cursing the withdrawing Soviets. Because of the troop movements, the entire Hungarian cargo transportation had come to a halt; phantom trains – as nonscheduled freight trains were called – rumbled across the country every night, taking with them everything worth taking. We'll have to pay the bill one day for our new freedom. By the time the last train leaves Záhony at the Ukranian border, we'll be left only with our bare asses. There is only one layer of hand grenades in the ammo cases, a camouflage; what's under that layer is the parquet picked off the floors of the garrisons they'd just left. They take full windows out of walls, frames and all. A layer of windows, a layer of blankets, so the glass doesn't break; they also take all the faucets and showerheads. Personal mines are filled with aspirins, rifle barrels with ballpoint refills and, supposedly, the fuel tanks of land-to-land missiles are filled with paprika from Szeged. They're taking the Parád mineral water and even the tiny chocolate bars made for kids. If they could, they'd bundle up the entire Hungarian food industry. The shitty stuff all stays behind. They dumped their diesel oil into the Zala River to make room for lump sugar. The oil barrels are full of expensive Hungarian sugar, and the fish would rather flop to the shore to die than suffocate in the water because of the oil. Around Pécs, six-year-olds
wear damaged gas masks to school, looking like aliens; and you can't let children play in the fields because of all the unexploded detonators in the dog rose bushes. A teacher, bawling, was telling a reporter that when she asked to borrow an eraser from a first grader, she noticed that the child's pencil case was full of machine-gun bullets; live bullets lined up as neatly as pencils. And when she searched the children's schoolbags she found more ammunition than books and notebooks. For thirty rifle bullets, you can get a hand grenade, that's the going rate, the first graders told her, and complained they only had the leftovers because the fourth graders found the cache, and they even had a machine-gun. Just imagine, one kid said to the teacher, you could fell trees better with a machine-gun than with a chainsaw. It takes my dad at least two minutes to cut down a beech tree, if the engine doesn't conk out; Sanyi Pongrác from IV/b emptied a whole clip in three seconds and the tree was already falling. We timed it with a stopwatch, but don't worry, we all stood back far enough.

They should have rotted in their mothers' bellies, right there in the middle of the taiga, said one of the railroad workers. “Overstaying their welcome by forty years, they don't even know how to make a decent exit. Even God couldn't civilize them. They're worse than Gypsies. At least Gypsies don't ride around in tanks; they eat what they steal, that's all. But them, they loot and steal so much we'd be working overtime for years to make up for it.”

“But at least they kept order.”

“You walked into the buffer and knocked your brains out, bud? Where was this order you're talking about? When did we have order here?”

“All right, all right, all I'm saying is we had a military force; you can't deny that. We had fighter planes, tanks, and everything; now we won't
have anything. In the last forty years, the Hungarian soldier didn't even know how to run; all he can do is grin, like an Albanian ass grins at the helicopters when the Slovaks or the Romanians are coming. A garden without a dog, I say. And you know damn well what that's like. Anybody can walk in. Does it make any difference if they drink whiskey or vodka? You're not getting any anyway. And I say it's better to have somebody here that we've got used to.”

“I never got used to them.”

“Why, they didn't interfere too much. We didn't invite them over for dinner, and they didn't chase after your wife; we didn't even know where they lived. They kept to themselves behind the No Trespassing and No Photos signs. You think Negroes will be better? In five years your grandchild will be a mulatto or mestizo or whatever the hell they call them.”

“No Negroes will come here; it's all over, don't you get it? That's exactly the point.”

“If the Negro doesn't come that's even worse, then we'll get really screwed. Because then, the day after tomorrow, the Romanians will fly the national colors even on the Parliament, like they did in nineteen-nineteen. I didn't like the Ruskies either, and that's the truth. They shot my brother to death in '56. With a bazooka they called the iron fist. Made my brother shrink to the size of a baby. Nasty thing, that iron fist; with a direct hit, it can turn a log cabin into toothpicks. I still say, if they're already here, and we got used to their faces, it would have been better if they stayed.”

.   .   .

Ever since the Soviet withdrawal had begun, this sort of conversation was heard in the food stores, in the pubs, and on the streetcars, as was the case when the Republic was first declared; everybody was talking politics then
too. Some people wanted neutrality with lots of banks, as in Switzerland, others preferred a monarchy, after all we had the crown for it and the king was still alive. He speaks Hungarian pretty well. We just have to remove all those nice paintings from the royal castle and ask Otto Hapsburg to come home. At least he is a gentleman, not like those other shady characters with no sense of tradition. And there was talk of Greater Hungary. The tax collector thought, for example, there was a good chance for revising the Trianon Peace Treaty. The French themselves admitted the treaty's conditions were unfair; that it was rigged like a soccer match. The Romanians took a trainful of whores to the negotiations, and while the old men were guzzling champagne and drawing up the new boundaries, the girls were fiddling with them under the table. Yes, my dear writer, these documents
have
come to light and the whole thing will be reevaluated.

And there were people who regretted nothing and wanted only one thing, that God should save us from the Jews, because otherwise we'll really be in for it. With government support, Jews will abort the babies of Hungarian mothers and within twenty-five years the Tel-Aviv government will simply move to Budapest, lock stock and barrel. They'll abandon that hellhole over there, with its broiling desert and Dead Sea, and open kibbutzim in the Little Hungarian Plain. They're already skulking around the fire. Using us to pick the chestnuts out of the fire, they are smothering the little bit that's left of Saint Stephen's country. Although there's no compulsory religious education yet, there is a Jewish half-hour on TV. And that's only what we can actually see. What every Hungarian can experience directly, so to speak. But of course, we never know anything about the secret moneys from New York. The dough to print a zillion election campaign posters with that rabbi's face had to come from somewhere, but not a penny is left for printing the
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
, is there?

And naturally, there were those who waited for the mailman to finally bring the secret moneys from New York with which to get back on our feet and to finance our cultural life. Because, pardon me for saying it, but it was just a little too much how this snarling band of pure-Magyars was carrying on. It's a good thing they don't string you up on the first lamppost, in broad daylight, but the day isn't very far off, I tell you. They'd think nothing of marching us down to the shore of the Danube, just like the Hungarian Nazis did. May God save us from
them!
Haven't we suffered enough until now? Let that mailman come with the secret moneys so we could create a little bit of Europe instead of this blood-curdling rabble-rousing frothing-at-the-mouth situation. What a shame; I swear to God, a downright disgrace.

Yet others swore that nothing had changed, and nothing would ever change so long as the earth carried communists on its back. They simply playact, pretend to hand over their power. With a little freedom of the press, they throw dust into the eyes of the West, but in fact, they have already taken root in every new party. They have thoroughly established themselves; all the moneys belong to them. Take all those Trade Union holiday resorts, for example. Don't tell me anybody would give up those without a fight, unless they are insured for a nice sum. Hogwash! This whole regime change has been rigged, like a soccer match.

And naturally, some people thought that while the dictatorship of the proletariat could admittedly use some reforms, first of all this rotten riffraff should be put up against the wall. What the hell do they think? Not so long ago they wouldn't have dared doing things like this. What the hell does it mean, Proletariats of the villas, unite? How dare they? Who raised this country from the ruins after '45? Who created heavy industry around here? The bus crossing the Mongolian desert is Made in Hungary; there
are Hungarian sleepers under the railroad tracks of Africa; the cockpit of the Tu-154S is made of Hungarian aluminum, and all they can say is Proletariats of the villas, unite? What do you mean the workers' militia has been disbanded? What do you mean the Soviet troops have no time to take care of things because they're busy packing?